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Timing, they say, is everything. The Stoning of Soraya M., which depicts the rigged trial and execution of an Iranian woman whose husband has grown tired of her, goes into limited release this Friday after playing at a few film festivals—and it happens to be coming out at a time when the eyes of the world are on Iran and the crackdown that has taken place there against the protestors who claim the June 12 election was rigged by the authorities.

Jim Caviezel as journalist Freidoune Sahebham

However, when CT Movies spoke to producer Steve McEveety and co-star Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) about the film, the election was still a few days away—so they never had a chance to address any of the connections that may exist between their movie and the headlines that are currently shaking the world.

They did, however, discuss how volatile the situation is in the Middle East, and how it took a lot of courage for writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh, an American filmmaker of Persian descent, and his cast of mostly Iranian actors (including Shohreh Aghdashloo, who was Oscar-nominated for House of Sand and Fog) to make the movie that they did.

For example, the film is based on a book by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, who was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the Iranian government because he reported extensively on the human-rights violations in that country. McEveety recalled how he and Caviezel had planned to meet Sahebjam while working on the film, but "the night before we were set to leave, we got word that he died. So it was kind of scary—we didn't know how he died. But we eventually found out that it was natural causes, thank God."

Was there any concern that there might be a fatwa—or death sentence—on the filmmakers themselves? "Sure there was a concern," said Caviezel, who plays Sahebjam, "but you know, it was interesting. The cast often said that it would be an honor—and these were Iranian actors—it would be an honor, more than the Academy Award, to be called on in a fatwa. I mean, they're patriots."

McEveety—who produced many films for Mel Gibson over the years, including Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, before starting his own company, Mpower Pictures—first discovered The Stoning of Soraya M. when he hired Nowrasteh to work on another project that had to be put on hold because of the writers' strike a couple years ago.

Faced with a lot of "down time," McEveety took a look at this other script that Nowrasteh had already written, and it blew him away—so much so that he immediately began to raise the money to make the movie, which turned out to be a lot easier than he expected. "This is the quickest movie I've ever turned around in my career," said McEveety. "From the time I decided to do it to the time we finished was just about a year, which is amazing."

On some levels, the film feels very much like an insider's critique of the abuses of radical Islamic faith. It begins with a quote from a medieval Iranian poet, and it goes to some lengths to emphasize that the trial which leads to the titular execution is not representative of how Islamic law is supposed to work; instead, the trial is manipulated by specific individuals, some of whom have secrets of their own to hide, who have corrupted the system to their own ends.

Producer Steve McEveety

But McEveety insisted that the story has a much broader appeal than that. "The reason why I was attracted to it, honestly, wasn't to make any statement about the Middle East or what's going on there. To me it was a universal story about abuse, and it was a story that empowered victims, and I think that this goes on everywhere in the world. Not to the degree of stoning someone to death," he added, "but women are abused here in America all the time and we just don't know about it because it's behind closed doors."

The film also serves as a sort of Passion of the Christ reunion, bringing together as it does not only McEveety and Caviezel but also composer John Debney. More significantly, the movie has some narrative parallels to The Passion, since it also revolves around an innocent victim whose slow, torturous execution is portrayed in brutal, harrowing detail.

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The Stoning of Soraya M.	Printer view